Beatles illegal track seller fined $1m

BlueBeat.com ran a streaming and download store, offering tracks from the Liverpool foursome, as well as others, until it was sued in 2009.

Days before the site was forced to shut down, it was reported that the store distributed over 67,000 Beatles tracks.

The mp3 files were being sold for 16p (25 cents), leading Judge Josephine Tucker to declare that the site had violated record company copyright and was deemed unfair competition.

Owner of the service, Hank Risan, defended himself by claiming that he had used a new technique described as "psycho-acoustic simulation". This allowed him to produce unique versions of the copyrighted material, reports BBC News.

The judge overruled the defense and described it as "obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language [that] appears to be a long-winded way of describing 'sampling'".

BlueBeat has claimed that the £625,000 payout is a fraction of what record labels EMI, Capitol and Virgin had sought and has asserted that the site will still remain active.